Bill Richardson - Published Works

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William Arthur Ridley (Bill) Richardson, BA (Oxon), Dip.Ed. (Oxon), PhD (Flinders), was born in London 27 July 1924. After education at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Surrey (1937-42), he served in the British Army in the ...

Those fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mariners who were literate almost certainly relied much more upon sailing directions than upon charts. A mere glance at some of the earliest surviving charts of areas ...

Claims that the Spanish and especially the Portuguese discovered Australia before the Dutch and English have gained a good deal of credence since they were first advanced. The matter is of some interest to the Geelong area ...

Within the last few years historians of cartography have become increasingly aware of the potential value of toponymy for the elucidation of early cartographical enigmas. One of the most notorious of these is the real ...

In this article, written in response to the recent publication of a book by Peter Trickett, 'Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and charted Australia and New Zealand 150 years before Captain ...

Maps by early non-Iberian cartographers tended to rely heavily on Ptolemy's hopelessly inaccurate maps, and on a literal acceptance of Marco Polo's unreliable, second-hand writings. The identification of dubious, frequently ...

Recently, two more works have appeared, by Gavin Menzies and Peter Trickett, also claiming that the non-existent landmass usually known as Jave-la-Grande (Great Java) immediately south of Indonesia on the mid-16th century ...

Too many people today expect early maps and charts of newly discovered lands to have similar standards of accuracy. They are unaware of how incredibly inaccurate many were. Information from different sources could be ...

The Dutch, under Willem Janszoon in the Duyfken, and the British, under James Cook in the Endeavour, have long been known to have reached Australia's shores in 1606 and 1770 respectively. For more than two centuries a ...

The age-old concept that a vast southern landmass must of necessity exist to counterbalance that in the northern hemisphere was given graphic expression by many cartographers, including Ptolemy, Johannes Schoener and Oronce ...

The continent of Jave-la-Grande on the mid-16th century manuscript Dieppe maps has been the subject of much speculation for over two hundred years and has been claimed to provide evidence of an early Portuguese discovery ...

For two centuries the landmass named Jave-la-Grande, which appears south of Indonesia on a number of French manuscript world maps made between 1542 and 1566, has been claimed by some to be an early map of Australia, owing ...

Richardson, W A R(The Great Circle. Australian Association for Maritime History, 1989)

As late as 1817, a chart of the Indian Ocean by L.S. de la Rochette was published in London by William Faden and approved by the Chart Committee of the British Admiralty. Among the numerous fascinating features on it is ...

Richardson, W A R(The Great Circle. Australian Association for Maritime History, 1992)

Recent place-name studies dealt with two variant, migratory inscriptions: the island of los romeros, actually Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean; and Psitacorum regio ('The Region of Parrots'), on a fictitious ...

Richardson, W A R(The Great Circle. Australian Association for Maritime History, 1985)

In this book Brigadier Fitzgerald summarises the arguments for and against the identification of the apparent continent of Jave-la-Grande as Australia, as provided by some, but by no means all of those who have written on ...

It is fairly well known that the name
Barossa, identifying South Australia’s
famous wine district, the Barossa
Valley, is derived from the name originally
bestowed by Colonel William Light, in 1837,
to the Barossa Range. ...